Remembering the unremembered: Women in Black are Real Change’s 2023 Change Agents of the Year

Real Change, October 11, 2023

Link: https://www.realchangenews.org/news/2023/10/11/remembering-unremembered-women-black-are-real-change-s-2023-change-agents-year

Who are the Women in Black (WIB)? For starters, they’re the recipients of Real Change’s Change Agents of the Year award this year for their silent vigils honoring homeless people who have died outside, in public or by violence, held on the steps of City Hall.

But you can’t talk about WIB without including SHARE/WHEEL — the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort and Women’s Housing, Equality and Enhancement League, respectively — the twin homeless-led advocacy groups the WIB project grew out of.

SHARE was a self-managed group of people experiencing homelessness that pushed for more housing and more agency in city government in the early 1990s. It won a number of important victories, but perhaps one of the most symbolic was a campaign to move the entrance of the Downtown Emergency Services Center (DESC) from what was then considered to be “crack alley” to its current location, on Columbia Street between Second and Third Avenues.

WHEEL, founded in 1993, grew out of SHARE when a wealthy donor who wanted to create a women-led version of the organization paid for the first full-time WHEEL organizer.

In 2000, WHEEL launched the city’s first overnight women’s shelter. The organization has since expanded, adding a second site on First Hill, but it cannot keep up with the need. It operates a third overflow space that is, well, overflowing. Mary, a resident of one of WHEEL’s First Hill shelters, said her sheltermates are there for reasons that ultimately stem from inequality — medical bankruptcy, substance use disorder, and domestic violence, to name a few.

“There are females who are running from their husbands, and they are leaving empty-handed. They’re like Tina Turner, but without the status,” Mary said in an interview at the shelter. Providing a space for specifically women is essential, she said, and the WHEEL shelters are one of the only places many women can go.

“You can come in here; you can use any name you want. They really protect you.”

The shelters weren’t the only thing that WHEEL launched in 2000; WIB’s first vigils began that same year. The idea that homeless people matter and have agency was and is integral to the SHARE/WHEEL organizations, and the founders of WIB carried that ethos into their work.

“There have always been deaths in the homeless community, and we’ve always found ways to come together and grieve,” said Anitra Freeman, a WHEEL member and former Real Change board member. “But there were some especially traumatic deaths in the late 1990s, and we decided we wanted more than just an occasional march, and we decided that we wanted to start vigils.”

The vigils have moved twice, from the west side of Fourth Avenue in front of City Hall to the east side of Fifth Avenue in front of the police headquarters and finally back to Fourth Avenue, on the grand staircase leading into City Hall. They chose to focus on only homeless people who died outside, in public or by violence, Freeman said, because “if we stood for everybody, we’d be out there 24/7, and you’d have to bring us sandwiches.”

The deaths of those individuals, she added, “are the deaths that are the most easily ignored and the most easily demeaned.”

WIB has made it much more difficult to do that, presenting a physical reminder of those deaths, as vigil attendees fan out across the steps with signs bearing the names of the deceased. They have added other visual stunts in the past. On Apr. 12, they did a “red tape” vigil, where they blocked off the steps of city hall with red caution tape as a metaphor for the bureaucracy they say stops enough shelter from being built. As they constantly remind the public, “Without shelter, people die.”

A spinoff itself, the group has its own side project, the Leaves of Remembrance. Small, metal maple leaves engraved with the names of people WIB has stood vigil for are affixed to the ground around the city in locations that are relevant to the homelessness crisis. They’re currently installed at St. James Cathedral, City Hall, Ballard Commons, Seattle Public Library’s downtown location, DESC, Compass Housing Alliance and Real Change, to name just a few places. The group also worked to erect the Tree of Remembrance in Victor Steinbrueck Park, a large sculpture memorializing all homeless people who have died outside, in public or by violence.

Through that work, WIB makes deaths visible that would otherwise be almost entirely invisible to society. They force passersby to look the crisis of mortality among homeless people in its face, and they do it at the foot of the stairs that lead to power in our city.

But what WIB also does is collect data. Using data from the King County Medical Examiner’s (KCMEO) “presumed homeless” list alongside other sources, like news reports or word-of-mouth, they have arguably the most comprehensive list of deaths among unhoused individuals in the region. This work is less visible but equally vital, as it provides proof of the problem in a form that elected officials and bureaucrats can understand. It also provides vital ammunition to advocates and journalists, including this one.

To truly explain how important their data work is, I have to break the fourth wall for a bit. WIB’s data and the data analysis done on it by an internal WIB workgroup were instrumental in the completion of one of the most important features I worked on during my tenure at Real Change, “A decade of deaths: Examining 10 years of data on how unhoused individuals die,” published November 2, 2022.

The piece examined 10 years of data from both WIB and KCMEO to try to understand how homeless people die, what special dangers they face, and why.

Without the data from WIB, I would not have been able to call this city’s mortality rate among homeless people out for what it is: a crisis. I would not have been able to include the startling statistics that homeless people are 19 and 5.5 times more likely than the general population to die by homicide and suicide, respectively or the fact that the median age of death for people in that cohort is 51, compared to 79 for the general population of King County. That article was one of our best performing pieces in terms of web traffic, so I know that crucial information reached people.

Since then, I’ve seen an incremental shift. As the Real Change newsroom completes our interviews with city and county council candidates, I’ve noticed more and more political hopefuls pointing out the urgent necessity of protecting homeless people. Even “public safety” candidates agree that being unhoused is inherently dangerous. How society can best protect homeless people is less easy to agree upon, but it’s a huge shift just to see these candidates saying that our homeless neighbors are worthy of protection.

I like to think that our work at Real Change beating that drum has helped create that narrative change, but I know that WIB’s work and their tireless dedication to it has.

The work we have done at Real Change in helping disseminate those truths would not be possible without the foundation laid by WIB. Our work is a drop in the bucket compared to what they have done and continue to do, and so I am extremely happy to congratulate them in print on winning Real Change’s 2023 Change Agents of the Year award.

This is not an empty honor. They have put a number to the Mayor’s ongoing and inhumane campaign of sweeping without shelter. They have forced our elected officials to realize the results of their policies. They have been our city’s conscience in the face of unconscionable inaction. And in doing so, they’ve made real, tangible change.

Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is the associate editor at Real Change.

Read more of the Oct. 11-17, 2023 issue.